The influence of Tarkovsky on the mystical gaze in Pontecorvo’s Fatima (2020)

Abstract

Unlike his predecessors, who made films about the event Milagre do Sol (‘The miracle of the sun’) that occurred in Fatima (Portugal, 13 October 1917), Marco Pontecorvo represents an enriched and original mystical gaze in his 2020 film Fatima. To achieve this, the Italian filmmaker drew inspiration from the creations of other directors, whose cinematic works have been described by some theorists or commentators as ‘mystical’. This article explores Andrei Tarkovsky’s influence on the mystical gaze in Pontecorvo’s film, considering the poetics of the four elements (air, earth, water, sun) and other motifs such as the bird or the angel, as well as various cinematic techniques. Going even further into the history of Soviet cinema, via Tarkovsky, this article shows that Pontecorvo uses various poetic means of expression specific to Ukrainian director Alexander Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930) and converts them into elements characteristic of the epiphany. In addition to these influences, there are also attributes of an original mystical gaze like Plato’s cave myth and the cave–cinema analogy.